Hunt David - Girt: the unauthorised history of Australia. Volume I, From megafunna to Macquarie

Our home is girt by sea.

Advance Australia Fair,

Peter Dodds McCormick, 1878

Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia. Switzerland, Paraguay and Burkina Faso are merely girt by other countries, but Australia is entirely and defiantly girt by sea.

No other nation can rival Australia for sheer maritime girtitude. Australia dwarfs its nearest rival, Greenland, by a girt factor of 3.52 (7,617,930 square kilometres to Greenlands puny 2,166,086). And Greenland isnt even a proper country, just a forlorn Danish outpost that reeks of pickled herring.

Australia justifiably celebrates its girtuosity in its national anthem, for the history of this wide brown land has been shaped by the even wider blue seas in which it rests. It was the warm currents of the Timor Sea that carried the First Australians to these shores, and it was Australias phenomenal girtage that kept these hardy pioneers blissfully unaware of trousers, smallpox, large mining companies, Shane Warne and the other trappings of Western civilisation for tens of millennia.

It was the vast reaches of the Pacific and Indian Oceans that led Europes greatest minds to conclude that so much water must be girting something for surely the world would tip from its axis in the absence of a Great Southern Land to balance the sprawling continents of the northern hemisphere. It was those same dark, churning waters that led the captains of Europes finest fleets, searching in vain for the elusive southern continent, to ask, So where the bloody hell are you?

But Terra Australis could not remain Incognita forever. The veil of waters parted for Willem Janszoon, Abel Tasman, William Dampier, James Cook, Matthew Flinders and Jessica Watson, revealing a land of golden beaches, storm-kissed bays and jewelled harbours.

And while the worlds other great powers saw Australias unparalleled girtedness as an excellent reason to steer clear of the joint, Britain saw it as a virtue, for it needed a place to stash all its pickpockets, sheep thieves and Irishmen. Britain fervently hoped that the tyranny of distance and the despotism of lots of water would prevent its undesirables from walking back to London.

Australias isolation made it a giant Petri dish, able to grow a unique culture. It attracted no-hopers, neer-do-wells, political prisoners, religious refugees, free thinkers and eccentrics. It drew adventurers and risk-takers and called to the poor, the disadvantaged and the merely socially embarrassing. It served as a bright beacon to a tsunami of opportunists, gamblers, entrepreneurs and gladhanders. Australian ports provided a gateway for sailors and fortune-seekers from all corners of the globe, and the lure of riches or men with big sticks carried the Chinese and Kanaks to our shores.

Australia was the place to be. Unless you were black. Or a woman. Or gay. Or suspected of being Irish. Or even worse, all of the above.

Yet geography, economy and necessity forced Australias disparate peoples into contact with each other, elevating men of low birth to greatness and lowering a fair share of the mighty. Rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, Catholic and Protestant and Jew were left to simmer in the cultural melting pot.

In time, a new and distinct people emerged from Britains colonial kitchen. A people who bathed regularly. A people who liked a bet, a drink and a smoke. A people who were good at ball games. A people who fought and died for whatever Britain or America wanted them to fight and die for and who laughed in the face of Johnny Turk, Uncle Tojo and anyone else who looked or spoke funny. A people who would push technology to its very limits, gifting humanity with the finest lawnmowers and clotheslines the world had ever seen and a strange brown paste that could transform a simple piece of toast into a simple piece of toast covered in a strange brown paste. A people who called themselves Australians.

While our identity evolved, the sea remained a constant. The first three governors of New South Wales were all naval men, which explains why rum, sodomy and the lash have played such an important role in Australian life. Sir Henry Parkes, the man who led the fight for an independent Australia and a poet of outstanding mediocrity, wrote in 1889:

God girdled our majestic isle

With seas far-reaching east and west,

That man might live beneath this smile

In peace and freedom ever blest.

Alfred Deakin, Australias second prime minister, finished his great 1898 speech in support of Australian federation with the words:

For God has made her one: complete she lies

Within the unbroken circle of the skies,

And round her indivisible the sea

Breaks on her single shore.

Robert Menzies yearned for the love of a blue-hatted woman who lived far over the sea. Malcolm Fraser lost his trousers on the other side of the sea. John Howard and Julia Gillard told people to go back across the sea. And Harold Holt, our greatest submaritime politician, has been girt by sea since 1967.

This is the story of a land and a people who always have been, and always will be, girt. This is the story of us.

Weve boundless plains to share

Advance Australia Fair,

Peter Dodds McCormick, 1878